How To Measure The Social Media Impact on Your Sales

This is a common question that many companies wonder. What is the value of a facebook fan or a twitter follower. The big challenge of course is that when you are building a relationship with consumers and engaging them from the top of the funnel until they convert, there could be many interactions that influence their behavior that is hard to track.

I was reading this excellent interview with Jay Baer by Pamela Mundoon about the metrics to measure when evaluating your content marketing efforts, and he mentions two stories that are so easy and simply brilliant.

Here is the story in Jay’s words,

“My favorite example that I use in presentations all the time is for California Tortilla. They’re a chain of Mexican food restaurants, ironically, with no locations in California, which I think is fraud on some level. They’re based in Baltimore. They do a great job of this kind of tracking. In Facebook, for example, they’ll have a Facebook status update that says something like, “Today’s secret password is ‘fresh.’ Come in to any location, say the word ‘fresh,’ and you get a free chips and queso with any burrito purchase.”

So, they put that on Facebook. They put a different password on Twitter and in their email newsletter. Before that goes out, they email all the store managers so they know what’s going on. The store managers tell the high school kids working the cash registers, so everybody knows what the deal is. You walk into the store, you say “fresh,” you buy a burrito, and they key it into the register like a coupon because it is, in fact, an audio coupon. They have a unified point of sales system, so they can run it back to the corporate office and say, “Here’s how many coupons we got from Facebook versus Twitter versus the email newsletter by location,” and you can put real value on that quite easily. “

Such a simple and brilliant strategy every single restaurant should be employing on their social profiles.

Jay continues to say that many of his clients, like a local theater company use Audio Coupons that they push out socially and track when they convert offline.

Coupons were invented by Claude Hopkins so he could track door to door sales. There is no reason not to exercise those same strategies online.

As the world slowly discovers that Content Marketing is a universal strategy that works quite well in B2C just as it does in B2b, and as entrepreneurs realize they need to start investing in the top of the funnel if they want to compete at the bottom of the funnel, measuring the effectiveness of your content and the value of your audience is crucial.